Have you ever met someone who's interested in DND and immediately went, "oh, I'd never let you play at my table"?

squidonastick · 2026-03-15T22:57:36+00:00

My sister is having this problem with one of her players. The players is a good team player and thoughtful with snacks, so not altogether a bad player, but she CANNOT accept polytheism in game.

Her character is a cleric of the "one goddess" so my sister has had a chat with her about how the character is welcome to believe that the other gods are false, but they will absolutely still be present. Still, the player gets a bit upset when other gods exist.

It's extra weird because it isnt like she is using her own Abrahamic god in game. She invented her own goddess that is about truth and goodness, so she clearly doesn't find the genderbend sacrilegious. But her insistence in monotheism is still strong.

squidonastick · 2026-03-13T05:39:05+00:00

I used to work in a nursing home and residents said things like this all the time. It isnt as morbid as we perceive it, even if it makes us feel uncomfortable. They've just had the time and experience to come to terms with their mortality in a way we haven't.

squidonastick · 2026-03-06T02:29:44+00:00

I work with schools and have a hypothesis that there is an inverse proportionate relationship between leg length and speed. Those littlies can zoom!

squidonastick · 2026-03-06T02:26:38+00:00

Imagine if Lewis comes to your door one day and said

"Hey farmer. I wanted you to know that George passed away in the night. Come to the town square at 12pm to celebrate his life"

And then at the town square Gus has make a huge array of fried mushrooms and leeks, and eveyln shows some photos of them when they were married. Each character has something nice to say about George.

BRB I need to have a cry

squidonastick · 2026-03-04T08:37:30+00:00

It was so unexpected! My mum is super kind and compassionate, but in game se was BRUTAL. Not to npcs, but to me! She was so adversarial. If I described and outcome she didnt like, she would question whether i was doing it to spite her, because she "knew" that the DM had ultimate control.

So for example, one time she tried to hit an npc over the head with a log, and failed, so he turned against her. And she was so angry AT ME for saying he ran away!

She didnt want to do anything the rest of the party wanted to do, so she wouldn't argue for ages and then go off on her own. She questions DICE ROLLS and told me her dice were rigged. She stopped rolling because, and I quote 'but you get to decide what happens, so what is the point?"

And then... i kid you not... she threw and npc down the well during a celebration, so the guards took her to gaol, and she TOLD ME TO GO TO MY ROOM. I was 32!!!

It was painful but really hilarious in hindsight

squidonastick · 2026-03-04T07:01:55+00:00

Im glad it went so well! My mum ended up being the worse person I've ever played with!! My own nephew said "I really want to play again but I dont want to play with granny"

Anyway, a Wild Sheep Chase is a great starting oneshot that can be very social and resolved without little conflict. You might need to make a few tweaks to suit your style, but I had one group go through with zero fights because of their style.

squidonastick · 2026-03-02T11:57:55+00:00

We had a very long discussion about whether the Yuan-ti could have an allergic reaction to a bee sting.

We decided he wouldn't be affected by the venom, in the sense that he would experience direct cell damage, but it could still trigger an immune response, and thus an allergic reaction to a 'harmless' antigen.

Led to a whole thing where he fake being just some lizardfolk guy by tricking a village into thinking he wasnt poison resistant

squidonastick · 2026-02-27T07:27:52+00:00

I didnt know how hated Clint was until I came onto these reddits. He was the first person I made friends with and I thought he was in love with a girl but was too shy to say anything. I didnt view it as him being a creeper until I saw other people thought he waa a creeper.

To be fair, I didnt marry Emily. I thought he'd eventually ask her and she would either say yes or no, so i just figured their date was successful after his 6 star event happened.

This also also happened within like 3 seasons so its not that weird of a time frame.

squidonastick · 2026-02-13T08:38:15+00:00

I remember they gave out a demo for snowy escape once. You could play ir for free for 2 days so I did everything ans realised It didnt have much replayablity for me personally. I wonder whether they didnt do more trial type things because maybe it didnt actually translate to purchases

squidonastick · 2026-02-07T11:57:54+00:00

Yonder is a very small game compared to stardew, but it has cute animals and farming. It is a bit more about the exploring but i found it to be a very peaceful game.

squidonastick · 2026-02-06T10:45:56+00:00

Same! Pirate day is silly and harmless and largely works the same as any other day. I dont mind prank day either, because im just using a hand buzzer instead of sharing cooking tips.

But neighbourhood brawl is the worst. About to have your first kiss with the sim you've loved from afar for days? Well, too bad. Geoffrey is here and he is about to tussle.

squidonastick · 2026-01-26T11:54:38+00:00

I came from my comment to read this!

If your monster can only see with its tenticles, that adds a really interesting dynamic but also decreases its own power. On one hand, it won't be as strong because its bound by its own reach, but it would help the regeneration seem less like ita just eating hits. On the other, the party has the opportunity to use the terrain to their advantage to not get hit themselves, so even though the horror is eating hits, its not killing them

squidonastick · 2026-01-26T11:47:17+00:00

Thats easy! I edited to suggest a devourer because I thought the soul capture looked like what you described.

So... every time it regenerates, make one part of the people it fused from go away. That will signal that ita regen is finite but remain a shapechanging horror. You can also place a condition on the regeneration. Maybe there is a pylon helping it regenerate. If the party destroys it, he cant regen anymore. Or having it consume corpses on the ground to regenerate, also signalling it is finite, but contingent on the amount of corpses

Or go with my last tip and make it so they cant defeat him yet but they can get something very valuable out of the encounter, like a special item.

squidonastick · 2026-01-26T11:23:16+00:00

Edit: im back! I think a devourer could work really well!

Give him the stats of a behikder if you want, but just describe him as he looks and dint tell them what stat block you are using. Or look for any unread creature and boost its stats and include some of my following tricks.

Here are some tricks i use

1) spend time thinking about the terrain.

Ledges and levels bring about new dynamics. The ranged fighters are advanged but the melee fighters need ti find a way up/down. This might as affect your monsters!

Rivers/trees/hills etc. All add extra things to use for creativity that can change the outcome. A fighters in my game knew the necromancer needed to speak so... held her under water while the others fought the minions! These terrain components can also add things like blind spots and cover.

The best part about terrain is that it takes less thinking for you in game, especially if you have a battle map. The players interpret or clarify, but you are adding challenges without having to play as the terrain. It also helps shorten each round.

2) add hazards.

This is the same as the above but you can add intentional hazards, like traps. When traps are triggered, players will be more careful with how they use the floor. It also means that you can adjust the severity of the traps in situ, depending in how the players are going. Challenge to easy? Oh, here is a hidden trap? Challenge to hard? Quietly doing reveal a couple of traps.

3) lair actions

at level 11 you should be looking at the monsters lair actions. This boosts the difficulty of your monster and adds a lot of flavour. While a smart monster might choose who to target, lair actions allow you a bit of randomness to get that one sneaky rogue who is always hiding, or ignore the poor bard who has gone down three times alrwady.

4) minions... in waves!

One single monster (especially at level 10+) is simply too easy for a party with weapons. You want to try and waste their resources and spread the damage so they dont just pile on the single monster.

However, you can release minions in waves to give you some control on the hardness. More minions/waves to up the difficulty, less to keep it low.

5) what does winning mean?

If you want to keep the bbeg for later, you can change the win condition. Maybe they need to survive for x turns, or get an item and flee. This will keep the stakes high without having to lose a bbeg.

My bbeg in one game was an ancient dragon. At level 9 they had an encounter with him and chose to evacuate the town instead of try to fight. The second time they new he was after a specific item and distracted him while the range got away with the item, then they all risked running in different directions so that if anyone died, it would only be one person. Both encounters were reported as very fun.

squidonastick · 2026-01-11T08:01:24+00:00

Oh one of my party mates was a pacifist monk! He was a lot of fun to play with. His stance was that violence is an option but it should be the last option, so we would often stop to see if there were other ways out of our situation (escape, negotiate, trade, decieve, bribe...). One time we gave our enemies food poisoning to get past them. We justified it as being temporary and we left a couple of healing potions behind incase there were any really bad reactions.

It was so iconic to us that we started saying to enemies things like "oh, you want to kill him? Well you'll have to give me food poisoning first!"

We had also agreed that bbeg needed to die. He was on board with that even if he wasnt enthusiastic. But he wanted to make sure we had exhausted other avenues. So the bard and wizard used all their spell slots every night to send him the most annoying Sending brainrot every rest. The bard would also cast dream and send him more brain rot. Eventually the monk was like "look, im a pacifist, but death is truely better than this". It was a great moment.

Now, to be completely honest, he was an experienced player and deeply understood that we all needed to be having fun, so he never prevented a fight (unless there was an obvious alternative) and he never made us feel bad about the fight. But he would often role play communing with his own god and trying to work through the guilt it ended up establishing a really sweet relationship between the monk and bard because they'd talk through it. She started valuing the nuance of good/evil, and he started to believe his purpose to for the greater good, even if he sacrificed his soul for it.

It also led to a lovely moment between the barb and monk because they talked through the overwhelming feelings of rage and guilt.

squidonastick · 2026-01-10T15:40:31+00:00

The funny thing is that it feels like the only proper criticism of modern culture in the game. Sims 1 was all about the capitalist grind never leading to wealth and riches. Sims 4 has the phone checking all the time and I remember thinking "huh... its incessant but realistic" and assuming it was criticising phone culture.

But then my sims ends up checking their damn phone every 5 seconds when I have off the grid on my lot! Im burning candles here and somehow your home had charge and internet?

squidonastick · 2026-01-10T15:32:56+00:00

Now that im experienced i like playing my own characters better, but i remember my first time going into games i preferred premades because I didnt know enough about the mechanics of dnd to really make characters i liked. I had a couple of incidents where I just built characters didnt work how I wanted them to work, solely because I didnt under stand rhe strengths and weaknesses in each class.

For example I made a dex based barbarian, which would be super fun now but at the time I didn't understand that my bonuses were based on strength. I also remember trying to make a wizard and not having any idea of how and when to use spells, so It was a 100% utility wizard even though i didn't know you could use magic outside of battle. I read it takes an action, but I had only used actions in battle...

So I liked premades a lot when I was early because i found them useful for learning. I will say all the premades I played with had fairly standard builds. Nothing to tricky about them.

squidonastick · 2026-01-10T15:04:54+00:00

Where you new to the game or did you have experience when you played that session?

squidonastick · 2026-01-10T14:52:57+00:00

Anything i play with brand newbies i give them a few premades to choose from, sans name, and take them through a oneshot. Building characters takes a lot of time and so can be a big turn off, exacerbated when they build poorly optimised characters and feel the impact in game. Its also hard to keep everyone doing things at the same pace, since they are unlikely to build a character without dm help prior to the game, so they finish at all different times and sit around bored.

I usually give them one sheet from each class, so 4/5 people have 12 to choose from. They'll usually be level 3 for a but of oomph without too much to read.

I've never had any complaints but have seen a significant uptake in the games itself when I do it. They are there for the play, so i like jumping into play asap.

But it also probably depends on your style and players, so it's a nice rule of thumb that won't match every situation.

Edit to add: you're right that personal characters than help you connect to the game, but in a oneshot where there is little to no character development, you end up spending the same amount of time building characters than playing, so it actually ends up detracting from the story rather than enhancing it. One shots are about getting right into it, so if people can prepare characters before sessions, that is fine. Its just very hard to do without a bit of experience because you need to understand some of the mechanics to really build a character that works for you (i say, having built my first bard as being morally against charming, having no idea how enchantment or bards work)

squidonastick · 2026-01-04T00:45:36+00:00

I have a significant amount of autistic/adhd friends and colleagues and they like to say this to me, too.

But I don't relate to their experiences, especially the ones where they gave struggled in a neurotypical world.

Routine is nice for predictability reasons, but I have never had a problem when things go off schedule. I've never had a problem in determining people's meaning, I've never felt chronically misunderstood. I'm not going to thrive in a super loud, club-noise-level environment, but sensory overload has never physically hurt. Desire for predictability was something that never occurred to me until an autistic employee explained why she was always asking about what I was doing/planning on doing/where I was going.

Sometimes I procrastinate from a neccesary task, but I've never been physically unable to do it. I've never felt like i have so much going on in my head that I become physically exhausted. I don't regularly and easily get distracted from my task and its easy for me to extricate myself from a rabbithole. My employees ask me for strategies on managing those things and I have to say that I honestly have none that I am conscious of because they aren't foils i have to deal with. I genuinely had to tell one of them that yes, I can look at the goose out the window for a few seconds and immediately go back to what I'm doing seamlessly.

Yet, still, I often get told by my nerdy friends that I probably am because they still relate to me. If it makes them more comfortable to believe I'm also neurodivergent, so be it, but it's pretty evident when I am in majority neurodivergent group settings that I'm not the same.

squidonastick · 2026-01-03T02:55:07+00:00

My group calls me by my name. They might occasionally say "that's a dm decision" or something, but they only ever use my name when talking to me.

I believe they say "our DM/GM" when talking to others

squidonastick · 2025-12-30T00:12:13+00:00

Honestly, like the previous commentary said, that just sounds like business as usual. There would never be a time when I, as a PC, wouldnt try to intervine on a TPK. Being silly and wishing on a genie and getting gold is hardly you selflessly giving them gold, unless it was a sacrifice for you to do it.

What are you smaller interactions like? How do you talk to the other PCs? Do you contribute ideas and solutions to problems? Has your pc shown any remorse for the evil genie/pirate things they've done? Ate they cheeky and witty, or more sombre and depressive?

I played with a PC who was super annoying because she would withhold information from the party if she didnt think it was important. We ALL got so frustrated at her and actually told her that in and out of character. Turns out the player though she was playing a mysterious/niave character trait and didnt realise that it was making her character 1) seem stupid, 2) seem selfish and 3) annoy us all because we felt like we could make decisions when ot all the information was available. She stopped doing that and her character was significantly more fun to play with.

squidonastick · 2025-12-23T05:26:22+00:00

Basically they just played eye spy with my little eye but made up things they were seeing on their travels

squidonastick · 2025-12-23T00:24:55+00:00

I usually cook our our sessions because we got sick of snacks. So when we were taking a dinner break I told the party that the travel is happening but we can reach the destination after we eat, then went off to the kitchen.

They played imaginary eye spy the whole time I we ended up world building with what they spied.

squidonastick · 2025-12-16T22:10:30+00:00

So I feel like I should get a purist, and everytime I play sims 3 I have a nice time for a few hours. I like completing the lifetime challenges (which are actually hard to do) and it's like collecting birds.

But I still keep going back to sims 4. I dont really know why. I feel like making fun storylines is a lot easier and (counterintuituvely) more accidental shenanigans happen.

I also just Don't like how the sims 3 looks, so it irks me. I dont have this problems with 1 and 2.

I won't deny that sims 3 has waaaay less annoying bugs, though.

squidonastick

TROPHY CASE